Journyx Project Management Blog

Richard MacManus has written an excellent article about IT fear of Web2.0 which is based on a Forrester Research report.

Recently I was at a CEO dinner here in Austin and the FBI was there telling us about all the foreign government-backed companies (read: China) that are conducting economic espionage in the U.S.

While I think the concern at a national level is overblown (and the solution probably overpriced), it is reasonable as a leader of a company to be cognizant of how you might reasonably minimize the risk of trade secret loss to other entities, wherever they are. Web2.0 technologies - any new communication technologies, really - exacerbate the problem. They just do. That doesn’t mean they’re bad per se, or that you should ditch the baby with the bathwater, but IT’s job is security and you shouldn’t prevent them from doing their job.

The article points out that 78% of IT decision makers are concerned about unsanctioned employee Web2.0 usage, but that in reality, big companies have only a few employees using these technologies today.

For a contrary view, take a look at this post at SmoothSpan Blog.

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

Inspire. Just the word itself causes us to pause and think. We may remember our own personal heroes like Martin Luther King or Mother Theresa or a teacher or mentor who brought out the best in us and showed us the power of one person.

It’s easy in business to get cynical when we’re surrounded by what I like to call “faux inspiration.” I’m talking about the corporate posters with motivational sayings that are easy to spoof when the actions of management don’t reflect the glossy images and quotations.

In my experience, inspiration comes from example. As Albert Einstein said: “Example is not the main thing in influencing others. It is the only thing.” So, that means we all have the power to inspire others by our actions. As project managers, you’re in a prime position to inspire your team. Here are 10 ways to get you started.

1. Have a clear goal with a reasonable approach to achieve it.
Shooting for stars may work for you when you’re developing your personal goals, but when you’re inspiring a team, people need to be able to clearly see how they are going to get from point A to point B and believe that it’s possible.

Learn the other ways at PM World Today.

Seems every time there is a conversation about metrics, two major groups emerge within the IT community: those that can’t figure out what to measure, and those that measure too much. One would think that developing quantifiable criteria by which success can be determined would not be such a difficult area with the IT arena; but based on the countless articles, workshops and seminars on the topic, metrics must be one tough nut to crack.

A search on the word metrics at www.gantthead.com returned 450 articles, blogs and discussions; more than just some light reading. So why then does it seem so straightforward to this old greybeard? As always, I have a theory about the difficult part and it goes like this: IT folks, in general, don’t want to be measured or held accountable for the value they deliver. They would prefer just to be trusted to do their best, and at the end of the day go home never to hear their beeper go off or answer a support call on their cell phone. In short, they are just like the rest of us.

Unfortunately, the world of business and good corporate governance doesn’t work that way. And besides, metrics done right can be a very good thing. In 2001, in my article “The Only Good Metric Is a Stakeholder-Value Driven Metric” published on gantthead.com, I stated:

“Building stakeholder-value driven metrics is not rocket science. However, building the right metrics does presuppose that you have a fundamental and definitive understanding of what and how value is being delivered to stakeholders and the gap between what is being delivered and what is expected and needed. Without that information in hand, it is unlikely at best, that quality metrics and supporting tracking and reporting systems will yield any returns.”

This is as true today as it was in 2001, maybe even more so. But there is a dark side to metrics. Metrics must be weighted and balanced so that no one metric dominates or contributes perverted performance. We all experienced what happened when the shareholder value metric dominated corporate thinking. Some CEOs and CFOs, in order to make their numbers and reap their rewards, resorted to cooking the books just to inflate the price of the company’s stock. As a result, we had the collapse of Wall Street darlings like Enron and Worldcom, plus a wonderful gift from the Federal Government called Sarbanes-Oxley. So if you think metrics can’t instigate havoc, chaos and destruction, think again.

Read on at Max Wideman’s Project Management Wisdom.

Remember in The Matrix when the little kid said to Neo, “There is no spoon”?

As CEO of a project timesheet company, I think about time a great deal. Part of my job involves trying to convince people that tracking their time is worth the effort. One response I got recently from a smart-aleck at a customer of ours (a large pharmaceutical company) was, “There is no such thing as time, so why track it?” He then directed me to an article in Discover magazine.

The following is my favorite quote from the article:

“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) “I said something like, ‘Your clocks measure time very accurately.’ They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time.’ I thought, Wow, that’s very humble of these guys. But they said, ‘No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

The Idea in Brief

Successful innovation relies on people—and people have different cognitive approaches for assimilating data and solving problems:

• So-called “left-brain” thinkers tend to approach a problem in a logical, analytical way. “Right-brain” thinkers rely more on nonlinear, intuitive approaches.

• Some people prefer to work together to solve a problem; others like to gather and process information by themselves.

• Abstract thinkers need to learn about something before they experience it; for experiential people, it’s just the opposite.

Cognitive differences are often subtle; people don’t naturally appreciate their significance. Managers who dislike conflict or who value only their own approach often fall victim to the comfortable clone syndrome, surrounding themselves with people who think alike and who share similar interests and training. Even managers who value intellectual diversity may not realize how difficult it can be for people with different styles to understand or respect each other. But to achieve creative abrasion, you have to make the different approaches rub together in productive ways.

Read the entire article at BusinessWeek.

This document is fifth in a series about the Seven Deadly Project Sins.

In this narrative, I will continue to focus on some of the “soft-elements” of the project, some temptations that the project manager needs to be on the lookout for in order to foster success on the project.

The Seven Deadly Project Sins as I have defined them are:

* Elitism
* Project Envy
* Resource Gluttony
* Project Lust
* Personalization
* Over-allocation of Resources
* Best Practice Sloth

The fifth Deadly Project Sin – Personalization can affect your ability to accomplish projects as a project manager.

On the Internet at www.wikipedia.com you can view this definition of personalization:

“Personalization (or personalisation) is tailoring a consumer product, electronic or written medium to a user based on personal details or characteristics they provide.”

Project Personalization involves tailoring the project to your personal desires or outcomes. Project personalization can also refer to the project manager feeling an extreme ownership of the project and taking events on the project as a personal affront.

Read on at PM World Today.

Ever wonder how your website stacks up against those of your competitors?

Ever wonder how your sub-sites are performing?

Alexa is a great tool for finding out such things. For example, here is a graph of Journyx’s traffic compared to some of our competitors.

Another great site for this is compete.com.

The people behind such websites gather this data by convincing you to install a toolbar or similar technology into your browser. You then become a ratings generator, sort of like having a box from AC Nielsen sitting on your TV.

The difference is that Alexa’s and Compete’s models are installed by more people, don’t cost much to generate data, and have the responsibility of grading a million TV stations (websites) instead of 500.

Interesting, huh?

- Curt Finch, Journyx CEO

I know that I take myself and my profession far too seriously. After all, managing projects for other people is how I pay for the roof over my family’s head and the food they eat. However, during the Christmas season even I take a step back to ponder the absurdity of it all. In that vein, I present for your consideration the following idea:

Consultants are almost exactly like Santa’s elves.

Here’s how it works.

The Big Man makes all of the decisions
Say you are the elf responsible for making sure some number of households get their toys this year. What decisions do you make? None, really. The jolly old fat man checks off who has been naughty and who has been nice. He decides whether to give them a plane, a train, or an automobile. Heck, he even decides whether the elves will do the work or whether to outsource it to some off-Pole electronics outfit.

The elves responsible for tools, wrapping paper, and ribbon control the raw materials of production. The craftsmen elves are the ones who get to exhibit some creative initiative, making things interesting for themselves and putting a personal stamp on the toys. Even the loader elves have more control, since they decide which bag gets stuffed and in what order.

The managing elf? Not so much. He’s just the one the not-so-jolly fat man yells at when things go awry. Which, naturally, they always do at the worst possible time.

Read the rest at TechRepublic’s IT Consultant Blog.

Their names are so familiar that they roll off your tongue like a song that keeps rattling around in your head: Steve Jobs, Andy Grove, Bill Gates, Vint Cerf. We could go on, but we wouldn’t want to mislead you.

Instead, this time out, we’ve put together a list of names you probably haven’t heard of. (No fair peeking at the Table of Contents quite yet!) From the pair who started the VLSI chip revolution to the man who received the first software patent to the guy who put the ampersand in your e-mail address, we searched high and low for people we’re betting you didn’t already know.

Without these innovators, even those whose work you may question — like the first to send out a spam message — we would all be experiencing a very different industry today.

Speaking of, we discovered the true father of the Internet. It isn’t Al Gore, and it isn’t Vint Cerf, though the latter got close.

Unsung Innovators

* Jean Bartik, ENIAC computer programmer

* David Bradley, inventor of the ‘three-fingered salute’

* Lynn Conway and Carver Mead, VLSI chip pioneers

* Marty Goetz, holder of the first software patent

* Andy Hertzfeld, original Macintosh OS designer

* Robert Kahn, the ’stepfather’ of the Internet

* Ted Nelson, hypertext creator

* Brad Templeton, funny man on a ‘dot-com’ mission

* Gary Thuerk, father of spam

* Ray Tomlinson, who put the @ in e-mail addresses

Read their stories at ComputerWorld.

Journyx is excited to announce availability of the latest and greatest version of our flagship product, Journyx Timesheet 7.6. This new version of Timesheet includes new import tools, support for Windows Vista, enhancements to the user interface and numerous additions to reporting and administration.

A few key features include:

• Ability to re-label column names based on the user’s entry screen assignment
• Stopwatch options for starting new tasks that automatically stop the previous tasks and a pause/resume control for current tasks
• Improved Leave Request Calendar interface with hover information on monthly view and detailed information on weekly and daily views

In addition to the new features in Timesheet 7.6, this release also addresses some bugs found in previous versions of Timesheet, so Journyx recommends that organizations running earlier versions upgrade to Timesheet 7.6 at their earliest convenience.

Read more about the features of Timesheet 7.6 (including the core
features of the entire 7.x series) at: http://journyx.com/rss/products/timesheet/76features.html

Get the patch & instructions at: http://journyx.com/rss/support/upgrade76.html

Or download the full installer at: http://journyx.com/rss/gendl.html